cellio | food tricks

This evening we went to an SCA household dinner. The theme was "old foods"; since I had failed to come up with any ideas around the "green and fuzzy" theme, we opted for what we hoped was entertainingly-faked documentation instead. We knew the host likes devilled eggs (as do I), so we told her we were bringing "devilled dodo eggs", and brought a facsimile of the recipe in the original hiroglyphics to prove it. Ok, maybe Mark Twain's "Diary of Adam and Eve" isn't really a primary source. :-)

I wanted to color the eggs in some way, just to give them an unusual appearance. I thought that I would get a purple hue by simmering them for a few hours in beet juice (with some white wine to help leech out color), but what I actually got was brown, not purple. Which was ok -- just unexpected. (I boiled the eggs, then rolled them around to crack the shells, and then simmered those. I completely peeled one egg to act as a color indicator, so I could check progress easily. On the other eggs I got a nice mottled effect.)

I have seen deep purple hard-boiled eggs. It's a striking effect with devilled eggs -- a nice contrast to the yellow filling. I wonder whether the process involved natural agents or chemicals.

We should take a turn for dinner sometime in the next several months, so I would like to grab a date around Purim and do "disguised foods". As part of this, I need to hit up my friend Yaakov for his "ham" recipe; I visited him for Purim last year and had this, and it was a remarkable imitation of real ham! I'm especially impressed because I'm pretty sure Yaakov has never tasted the real thing. (He called it "vam", so I infer that it's really veal. I don't actually know; Yaakov can say "here, taste this" to me and I'll do it without further questions.)

food tricks

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